What is a sketchnote? (with 12 examples)

The 30-second definition

A sketchnote is a visual note — a single page that captures the shape of an idea using handwritten lettering, simple icons, arrows, frames, and color. It's not "art." It's a thinking artifact. A sketchnote of a one-hour talk fits on an A4 page and gets remembered for months. A bulleted recap of the same talk gets skimmed once and closed.

Sketchnotes were popularised by Mike Rohde in The Sketchnote Handbook (2012) and they've quietly become the default note-taking style at conferences, in design studios, and increasingly on LinkedIn — because they're the rare format that's both useful and shareable.

The four ingredients

Every good sketchnote leans on the same four building blocks:

1. Hand lettering — a couple of weights, two or three sizes. The headline is big. The detail is small. Hierarchy is doing the work.
2. Icons and figures — stick figures, arrows, lightbulbs, gears, callouts. Nothing has to be drawn well; it has to be recognisable.
3. Frames and containers — boxes, banners, ribbons, dotted lines. They group related ideas so the eye can navigate the page.
4. One or two accent colors — usually a highlight (yellow), an alarm (red), and ink (black). Three colors is plenty.

If you can do those four things, you can sketchnote.

12 examples to steal from

1. Meeting recap — Decision in the centre, why on the left, next steps on the right.
2. Customer interview — Quote bubbles around a stick-figure customer; pain points in red, "aha" moments in yellow.
3. Keynote talk — Speaker name and title at top, three core arguments as columns, key quotes inset.
4. Book summary — One page per chapter: chapter title as banner, three ideas with icons, your reaction at the bottom.
5. Podcast episode — Host + guest as headshots, episode title big, five takeaways as a numbered ladder.
6. Standup digest — Mon → Fri as a timeline, blockers in red, wins in green.
7. Strategy map — North star at top, three bets below, biggest risk in a red box.
8. Workshop wrap — Sticky-note clusters redrawn as themed islands.
9. LinkedIn post art — Your hook as the headline, three supporting points as icons, your CTA in a tape-strip.
10. Vision board — Word-of-the-year in the centre, six themes radiating out, two accent colors.
11. Manifesto — Numbered creed lines, one bold serif, generous whitespace.
12. Bedtime story — Three scenes across the page, hand-lettered title arc, one tiny character throughout.

How AI sketchnotes work (and where they fit)

Hand-drawn sketchnotes take 20–60 minutes per page. That's wonderful as a practice and terrible as a deadline. AI sketchnote generators — like the one built into scribblez.ai — take the same input (a transcript, a post, a set of notes) and compose a sketchnote in under a minute.

You won't get the personality of a human sketchnoter. You will get the structure — the hierarchy, the icons, the page composition — which is what most readers were going to remember anyway.

The ideal stack is honestly both: AI for the recap nobody had time to draw, hand-sketching for the moments that deserve the practice.

Try it

Pick any meeting transcript you've got sitting in Otter or Fireflies. Paste it into the app, pick Strategic Sketchnote, and watch a one-page recap fall out of it.

Then look at the eight templates above and steal the structure you like best for next week.